Time Capsule: Home computers of the 80's.

[tron3]

First rule is no mention of gaming systems. We already had a long thread on that. Just non-pc home computer systems. Ok, let's start our nostalgic trip down rem-ory lane.

My first was the Texas Instruments 99/4A Home Computer. First to have a 16 bit CPU (albeit 8 bit bus), 16K ram, and BASIC programming built-in. Much like my fist PC I had ZERO productive software for it. Not even a single game. Not even a cassette storage device!

However, I was undaunted as I was so curious as to how programming languages worked I studied the two enclosed programming books in depth. I wrote sizable programs in that 16k space. Though it doesn't seem like much, once I finished a program I had no way to save it, except to write down the program line by line in a notebook I still have. Took pages and pages to save them.

Months later I finally bought a cassette system and spent an entire weekend re-keying my programs to save them on tape. The slow rythmic byte crunching sound of data being saved was music to my ears. And though it could take minutes to load a program I wrote, it was like lightning compared to the re-keying I did to run my programs.

I later bought Extended BASIC and learned the joys of sprites. The stored speech module gave me the joy of...well, speech! By the time I stopped spending money on it in about 1990, I was up to about 90 cartridges, dual floppies, and even dual cassette!

The last time I spent any money for it was actually about a year ago. Someone on ebay sells a yellow composite cable adaptor for use on more modern tv's. No more 300 Ohm connectors.

I learned so much on that thing and it spring boarded me into an IT career. What would have become of me if I had listened to all the nay sayers who said I should not buy one?